What Junior Eurovision tells us about Britain’s place in Europe

East Europeans take it seriously, and we should, too, says Chris West

On Sunday, the junior version of the Eurovision Song Contest will be held in Tblisi, Georgia. Contestants have to be aged between nine and 14 to participate; last year’s winner, Mariam Mamadashvili, was 11. The tone is, as one would expect, upbeat; the Eurovision message of “let’s all be nice to each other” will be in many of the songs.

Cynics may cringe. The show is certainly rather odd. It is a strange hybrid: half the adult version, with its high production values and emotional songs, half a school talent contest, with Miss Jones making sure that nobody gets too out of order. Watching the hosts of last year’s contest trying to gee up the youthful audience brought back (for me) childhood memories of Crackerjack!.

European identity

However, the competition is taken very seriously by its contestants. This is especially true in eastern Europe. Eight out of the contest’s past 14 winners have come from the former Soviet Union (Georgia, this year’s host, holds the record, having won three times). In the Brexiting UK, we forget how keen many countries on Europe’s periphery are to belong more closely to Europe. Junior Eurovision reminds us that the countries of the European part of the old Soviet Union are particularly keen.

They value their Europeanness; they see it as civilisation, liberal values, prosperity, an escape from their past. For them, Eurovision, senior and junior, is a way of asserting European identity.

This even seems to be true of Belarus – hardly a liberal, Europhile state, but which appears to treat the competition as a way of hedging its bets. Minsk will be hosting the junior show next year, and the country’s Helena Meerai (her father is Syrian) is one of this year’s favourites.

Precocious children

To many in Britain, there is something slightly unsettling about Junior Eurovision’s precocious children. Fans will cite France Gall’s winner for France in the main contest in the 1960s, “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”, in which the 17-year-old Gall criticised the music biz for creating child stars who sang about adult love but didn’t really understand what it was about.

Have the Junior Eurovision contestants been “hot-housed”, in the same way that young Romanian gymnasts once were? Perhaps, but this all goes to show how ambitious the participating countries are. Their ambitions are being fulfilled, too. Europe’s focus is moving East, a process that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, accelerated with the move of the German seat of government from Bonn to Berlin in 1999, and will no doubt be further speeded up by Brexit.

There are opponents of the “moving East” view. Head East, they say, and you will find virtual war between Russia and Ukraine, and frozen conflict between Russia and Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Junior Eurovision may bubble with let’s-all-love-one-another enthusiasm, they argue, but behind that sentimental façade, old hatreds still seethe. You can’t remove the legacy of Holodomor [Ukraine’s great famine] by getting a 13-year-old to put on a spangly dress and sing about world peace.

Or can you? If people are going to be sentimental, it’s better they are sentimental about peace rather than hate, about universal love rather than nationalism.

A new generation

Above all, perhaps, Junior Eurovision is a reminder that a new generation may not see things the way their elders did, and may well want to ditch old hatreds, not out of sentimentality but because it suits them, because they want to live and prosper in a kind, connected world. Or at least in a kind, connected Europe.

The Junior Eurovision Song Contest is not being broadcast on UK television, though you can catch it on the competition’s website: https://junioreurovision.tv. The show begins at 3pm.

Chris West is the author of ‘Eurovision! A History of Modern Europe Through the World’s Greatest Song Contest’, published by Melville House UK

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